Be sure to include your name, daytime phone number, address, name and phone number of legal next-of-kin, method of payment, and the name of the funeral home/crematory to contact for verification of death.

The Royals can talk all they want about Bubba Starling possibly going back to Class A Wilmington as not being a bad sign, and Starling is a special case, but if he doesn’t progress this year it will be even harder to preach the patience stuff.

I’ve always been a proponent of court-storming. I see it as part of what’s unique about college basketball, and I never want to be the old middle-aged guy telling college kids they can’t have fun. But it does need to be safe

The Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers are jointly investigating the possibility of sharing a stadium in Los Angeles, which could give the KC Chiefs a pair of road games in the same stadium every year.

In Sam Mellinger’s latest feature in which he asks for just a few minutes of your time to waste on sports and other very important stuff, he discusses Alex Rodriguez’s apology, the Chiefs’ draft strategy and more.

So, last night, two things happened in college basketball that are worth talking about here for a second. We’ll start with the local, and by now you’ve probably seen how the Kansas-West Virginia ended.

I was going to lead this silly weekly timesuck with this idea anyway, and then Kanye West made it so much easier. Kanye, you surely heard, faked like he was going to highjack another musician’s acceptance speech at a made-for-TV awards show. He then said a lot of nonsense about respecting artistry and not taking it anymore and some other things that people decided to have very strong opinions about and I just can’t help but think:

The Big 12 basketball season is almost exactly halfway over. Six of the ten teams have played nine games. And while it’s a stretch to say the conference race is over, what was supposed to be Kansas’ stiffest challenge in some time looks more and more like an 11th consecutive conference championship.

The NFL invited sports media folk like me to this small conference room to make a point about the fight against concussions but what ended up happening is a glimpse into both the honest difficulties and bumbling execution of this mission.

The biggest football game of them all will be hyped here in an otherwise drab downtown and played a few miles west in the giant space ship off the 101. You have probably heard about this. It’s the game so big we’ve made a national scandal out of how much air is in a football. CSI: PSI, or something.

Some franchises are tripped up when the leadership structure cracks. Without complete trust, things can go sideways. The Royals have had a lot of problems over the last eight years, but that’s never been one of them. That’s why Ned Yost will stay as manager as long as he wants and the same is true for general manager Dayton Moore.

Just five years ago, the people in charge of college football responded to a Sports Illustrated story about what a potential playoff might look like with a string of make-believe hyperbole that they had to know would someday be proven as silliness.

Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith acknowledged that he watched every play from the 2014 season to learn and better prepare for 2015. Over the last week or so, columnist Sam Mellinger watched every one of Smith’s dropbacks this season to see whether he could find some plays Smith will pick out as missed opportunities.

Today's Circulars

Aboutthis blog

I've been at the Star since 2000, first covering local high schools, then major league baseball and now the columns since 2010. Kansas City is home to me -- my wife and our crazy dog, too -- and hopefully that helps. I've covered everything from the Super Bowl and Olympics to high school swimming and dirt track racing, always trying to tell the best stories with the best insight. This corner of the internet will be a mix of analysis, serious conversation, nonsense and behind-the-curtain scenes on the best days. Hopefully we can keep it fun and interesting. Thanks for reading.